Comix Zone was a 1995 Mega Drive game that got ported to Windows 95 in November of that year - and only in looking that up, have I realised just what a fresh release it was, when I first played it that Christmas. Its story was that of a man with small circular spectacles and a very 90s ponytail, who is sucked into the comic he’s drawing, and… nope, can’t remember the rest. But I suspect it wasn’t too full of surprises. It was a beat ‘em up, and the really cool thing about it - genuinely - was that the levels were all comic pages, where you would have to fight through each panel, before somehow busting through into the next. I’ve tried to gauge, with a brief online trawl, what the world’s retrospective consensus on Comix Zone is, but after five minutes of looking, the answer seems to be a collective shrug. I’d love to tell you myself, but I only played the first four or five panels, about a dozen times, before giving up. I can’t honestly say whether this was because it was bastard hard, or because there was some vital, progression-necessary feature that the game’s lack of manual had left me unaware of. In fact, the single thing I can remember, past the comic-panel gimmick and the look of the protagonist, was the first enemy - a sort of cockney rat man, who would repeatedly bellow “Pack it in!” when you hit him, and then “Buurn” as he shot fire at you. That’s it, I’m afraid: that is my sole enduring memory of Comix Zone. So: have you played it? Was it any good? What further insight can you provide on the “pack it in” man?
